


the weight (of someone's ghost)

by rarmaster



Series: (who's gonna) Save the World [5]
Category: Kingdom Hearts, RWBY, Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, cw for small amounts of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 12:16:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13387623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarmaster/pseuds/rarmaster
Summary: Part of theSave the World Crossover. There are rips in the time-space continuum, and these kids gotta try and survive (and, maybe put a stop to it).Riku (well, the Riku Replica, but that's besides the point) and his friends make their way through an abandoned city. Shadow finds himself chasing ghosts.





	the weight (of someone's ghost)

**Author's Note:**

> chronological order? don't know her!

The three of them were making their way through another city. It was a city unlike one Riku had ever seen before these past, uh, few weeks. (Had it been longer than a few weeks? It was hard to tell, especially since his internal clock auto-adjusted to wherever he was, and neither him nor his companions seemed to need a regular amount of sleep. Riku knew for him, it was because he was a Replica, but what excuse did Penny and Shadow have?) There were skyscrapers in the distance, though currently they were walking through a residential district. Cars were parked outside of the houses, but the cars were empty, as were the houses. The city was beautiful. Or, it would be if it wasn’t unsettlingly empty.

Empty, and coated with black goo.

They’d seen this black goo before in their travels. It was no different now, other than it wasn’t bubbling and producing monsters like it had in the past. Which was… good, Riku supposed, but he was still uneasy.

Penny turned and sent a reassuring smile at him, eyes gleaming. He returned the smile, grateful.

“I’m sure we’ll find a portal soon,” she said, bright and chipper as she always was. She walked down the street—they were in the center of it, because with the city apparently devoid of life, there was no need to worry about any _moving_ cars—with her hands behinds her back, grinning a grin that could rival Sora’s, burning with a sense of optimism that could rival Joseph’s. But, that’s just the way she was.

“Wish we had a more efficient way of tracking them,” Shadow grumbled. He skated along ahead of Riku and Penny, as he always did. It was at a much slower pace than what Riku knew to be his default, but that was Shadow’s way of showing he didn’t mind putting up with Riku and Penny. Riku knew less about Shadow than he did about Penny, because Shadow continued to keep himself closed off, and seemed to be trying to avoid making attachments. Which, alright, Riku supposed. He missed his friends and family too. But if they were all stuck together for an indeterminable amount of time…

“Honestly, we’re lucky Riku can sense them at all!” Penny shot back. Laughing, but a little sharp.

Riku ducked his head down, embarrassment burning in his cheeks. “Smell them,” he corrected quietly, rubbing at his nose. They had a sharp, almost electric smell—similar to what star shards smelled like after transporting you somewhere. Probably everything that involved interdimensional travel smelled like that, if Riku had to make a guess about it.

Shadow skidded to a halt and turned around so he could face Riku and Penny. “Well?” he asked, eyebrows raised in Riku’s direction.

Riku rolled his eyes. “If I’d smelled one, I would have said so!” he answered. Maybe it was a little sharp, but if Shadow wasn’t gonna have any patience, why should he? “Like you said, it’s not very efficient—‘specially since I need to be within like, fifty feet of one.”

 “We could start poking around in some of these houses,” Penny suggested. “Maybe one’s hiding and you just missed it.”

Riku shrugged. “Definitely possible.”

“Also, I’d feel a little bad about it,” Penny said, “but if no one’s here… A house would be a better place to rest than any of the other places we’ve stopped, uh, recently.”

Sleeping in an actual bed in an actual house would probably make him more homesick, but otherwise Penny had a valid point, so Riku nodded.

“That’s true. Might as well take the opportunity while we have it,” he said, to try and further convince the unconvinced Shadow. “Though we’ll uh, maybe want to do something about this goo.” Riku gestured at it with his foot—there was a puddle of it not two feet from him. (He knew better than to touch it. That was a mistake you only made once. And Shadow had made it, not him.)

“Guess it _would_ be pretty hard to sleep if we were constantly worried about being attacked,” Penny admitted. “So, hmm, let’s go with—”

“Did you hear that?” Shadow interrupted.

Penny and Riku exchanged glances.

“Uh… no?” Riku answered, which was strange, because he was positive his hearing was better than Shadow’s.

Shadow didn’t seem deterred. He’d swiveled back around, scanning the street ahead of them. When he saw nothing there, he turned first to the left, then the right, searching with a kind of desperation that seemed uncharacteristic for him. It was just as Shadow was starting to give up, turning his head with embarrassment and disappointment, that Penny gasped.

“Oh!” she said, and she pointed over Shadow’s shoulder, at a figure further down the street. It looked like… a little girl? She had pale hair, and a blue dress, looked like she wasn’t much older than ten. She definitely hadn’t been there two seconds ago, either.

Penny started asking where the girl had come from, and talking about how dangerous it was, but Riku’s attention was on Shadow. Shadow, who’d stopped. Completely. He stood dead still, like the sight of this girl was profound, important.

“Maria…?” he whispered, so quiet Riku could barely hear.

“Come on, Shadow!” the girl called. “Let’s play tag, like we used to!” Her voice was ethereal. It did not seem to come from her mouth, instead echoing through the air around them.

Giggling, the girl took off.

“Shadow? Who’s—?” Penny began, but Shadow took off before she could finish asking.

“I don’t like this,” Riku said. The scent of darkness was strong in the air, and a pit settled into his gut as he and Penny took off running after Shadow, though there was no way they were going to be able to keep up if he was at top speed.

“Well, I suppose it is kind of strange that, if she was a friend of Shadow’s, she didn’t even take the time to say hello, but perhaps…” Penny stopped there though, not even convinced herself. Shadow drifted further and further out of sight ahead of them.

Riku squeezed his eyes shut a moment and tried not to groan. “We’re going to have to do the thing,” he sighed. His voice sounded tight even to his own ears.

Penny almost tripped as she turned to send a worried look at him. “Are you sure?” she asked.

Riku nodded, even though he didn’t like it. “We can’t keep up with him otherwise, you know that.”

“Right…” Penny nodded along with him, because she did know. “Sorry!” she said, as she pulled herself to a halt.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Riku insisted. He stopped running too. “Gotta do what we gotta do,” he mumbled, sticking his arms out to either side.

Penny kicked on her rocket boots, and came up behind Riku, hooking her arms under his so she could hoist him into the air. She didn’t have much difficulty, because she had some incredible super-human strength, and Replicas like Riku came light anyway. Riku grit his teeth and kept his eyes shut for the first few seconds after his feet left the ground. It wasn’t the flying he minded, it was the way Penny was grabbing him. But there wasn’t any other way—short of her giving him a piggyback ride, which he was too tall for—and… Honestly, it was fine. He was starting to get used to it.

“There he is!” Penny said. “And there’s—oh! How’d she get up there?”

Riku opened his eyes. There was Shadow, in the middle of the street still. And there was the girl, on one of the roofs. Except, as soon as Riku located her, she vanished, and reappeared in the street in front of Shadow again. She kept giggling, as she continued like this—moving impossible distances in the blink of an eye, coming in and out of sight, calling for Shadow to follow her.

“Maria, wait up…!” Shadow called after her. He almost sounded like he was… enjoying this?

“Alright, I don’t like this for a lot of reasons,” Riku said to Penny. Among them, no human could run faster than Shadow, but then, this girl wasn’t even running. “But I’ll bet you like twenty thousand munny that she’s an illusion.”

“What’s… munny?” Penny asked.

“Penny we don’t have time for that!”

“Right, sorry. What should we do? I don’t know where she’s leading him, but I doubt it’s good.”

 _Me neither,_ Riku thought. He noticed now that the dark goo on the buildings was a lot thicker, and a lot more abundant. The scent of darkness was thick in the air, and even the sky had begun to darken. Shadow had his hover skates to thank for being able to pass right over the much larger puddles of goo that covered the street.

“Don’t worry about the girl,” Riku told Penny. “We need to focus on Shadow. Set me down in front of him.”

“You sure this will work?”

“No but we have to try.”

“Alright!”

Penny dropped him in front of Shadow, making sure to set him in a clean section of the street as well. Riku held out his hands in front of him, bracing himself to catch Shadow if he had to. He _was_ directly in Shadow’s trajectory. “Shadow, listen, she’s not real—” he began. Shadow ignored him, though, and swerved to skate around him. Riku tried to grab him as he went past, but no luck.

“Shadow, please!” Penny called. As Riku swiveled around to watch Shadow, he saw Penny set herself down some twenty feet further down the road. She pulled out her swords and made a wall out of them, hands also braced in front of her to catch Shadow. Shadow skidded to a halt this time.

The ghost of a girl stopped too, not far behind Penny, easily visible through Penny’s wall of swords. Her eyes did not leave Shadow, and she kept smiling. She was standing in the middle of a goo puddle.

“Come oonnnn, Shadow!” she called, voiced pitched like a whiney child.

“No, Shadow, listen to us,” Penny argued. Shadow’s attention reluctantly snapped to her. “Riku’s right. There’s something funny going on here.”

“Have you watched the way she moves?” Riku asked, because Shadow was usually good at paying attention to details like that.

“No one’s faster than you, Shadow,” Penny added.

“Shadoooww,” the girl called. Immediately Shadow’s attention snapped back to her. “Come play with me!” Shadow moved uncertainly towards her, but Penny’s swords made an efficient enough barrier that he didn’t get more than a few strides before he stopped to reconsider.

“Shadow, no!” Riku shouted, trying to keep Shadow’s attention. “Don’t listen to her. I don’t know what she is, but she’s definitely trying to trick you!”

Shadow rounded on him. “How could you _say_ that!?” he snarled, lips pulled back to show his teeth. His voice burned with a thick desperation. And there was something his eyes—some wild kind of yearning that made Riku uneasy.

 “Think about this, _really_ think about this,” Riku pleaded, not sure what else to do. He just had to make Shadow see. “Is there actually any possible way that Maria would _really_ be here?”

It was a hunch, because he had no idea who this girl was or what she meant to Shadow, and with all the portals they kept running into, maybe it _was_ possible. But also, in the little Shadow had talked about his past, Maria had never come up. Riku weighed that against the way Aerith rarely talked about Zack. He wondered if it was for the same reason. Something about the way she spoke, about the way Shadow was responding, made him think so.

Shadow seemed to crack, just a little. He blinked his eyes a few time. His shoulders went from tense to slumped. “I… I…” he whispered, voice catching on the words like he didn’t want to say them.

“I missed doing this, Shadow,” the girl said, before Riku could open his mouth to keep prying at this crack. “It’s been so long.” There was a softness, a tenderness in her voice that seemed to reach out to Shadow. Shadow squeezed his eyes shut and shivered where he stood.

Penny sensed the urgency of the situation before Riku could. “Shadow, no…!”

But Shadow did a spindash over Penny and her wall. The girl giggled and took off again, Shadow not far behind her. Riku ran to join Penny.

“Well that didn’t work!” Penny said. She sounded really disappointed.

“We almost had him,” Riku said to reassure her, even though… He couldn’t say he thought it’d work a second time. Maybe if he got Shadow to see the unnaturalness of her movement, to really analyze the situation—But then again, if Shadow knew she was a ghost, and was deliberately ignoring it, there would be nothing they could do.

Penny hummed a little to herself, a sharp hum that Riku was starting to learn meant she’d come upon a decision she wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

“If I get rid of her, will that help?” Penny asked, eyes fixed on the girl. She hadn’t lead Shadow too far off yet.

“Uhh, worth a shot,” Riku told her. Certainly, if the illusion was dead, she wouldn’t be able to keep manipulating Shadow.

Penny nodded, short and sharp. She pulled one of her blades towards her, aimed down it, then fired. The bullet let loose with a resounding _bang,_ and the bullet hit the girl square in the back. She fell forward and let out a cry of pain. She didn’t move once she’d hit the ground.

Shadow staggered as if the bullet had hit him. He became very still, eyes fixed on the figure of the fallen girl. He convulsed a little, like wrestling with a storm inside of his chest. It was then that Riku realized they’d made a mistake.

“I’m- I’m sorry, Shadow!” Penny shouted, realizing the mistake as well. “She wasn’t- that wasn’t the real Maria, though—”

A pair of golden rings fell to the ground at Shadow’s feet.

Riku lunged forward, shoved Penny out of the way.

He was met with a spindash and a thousand tons of chaotic energy colliding with his stomach. The force knocked him into a building behind him. Yelping with pain, Riku was silently grateful that Replica bones were more of a suggestion than anything else, because that blow should have obliterated his ribs.

As it was, Riku had to blink through blurry eyes, the pain making his head spin. He hadn’t known Shadow could even _hit_ that hard.

“P- Penny—” Riku croaked, but couldn’t get out anything else. He wanted to apologize. He should have realized that attacking Maria was a bad idea sooner, because there was something so stupidly achingly familiar in the longing that had burned in Shadow’s eyes, in the way he’d been clinging to a ghost.

But fine, if he couldn’t speak, the least he could do was throw up a shield spell for Penny. But it hurt to even _think._ He couldn’t get his mind to focus enough to pull for the magic, and—

He squeezed his eyes shut again. The sound of metal crunching graced his ears, followed rapidly by Penny screaming, then the sound of something heavy hitting the ground. He tore his eyes open.

Penny lay a few feet in front of him, eyelids fluttering shut. Her neck was bent at kind of an awkward angle, and so was one of her legs. But what drew Riku’s eyes was her left shoulder. Jutting out from where her arm should have been was a set of wires, all sparking with energy. Her arm lay ten feet to the right.

In hindsight, Riku thought, staring at the wires, this should have been obvious, too.

With some effort, Riku made himself look away from Penny so he could find Shadow. His vision was still blurry at the edges, but Shadow was easy enough to make out. Twenty feet back he stood, breathing heavily, eyes burning with a righteous fury that maybe he deserved. Riku had no idea whether Shadow would consider that enough, or if he would keep attacking.

And the dark goo was still surrounding every surface around them. Riku was lucky enough to have landed just inches from one puddle, instead of in it. Another Maria could pop up at any second, and Shadow probably wouldn’t think twice about it. Where would she lead him?

Cursing, Riku realized there was something he _could_ do.

Or, well, he hoped.

He’d been there when Rinoa and Aerith had given Kairi the lesson, and had even made a few half-hearted stabs at it. It had been fun, at the time, and he hadn’t minded much not being able to successfully perform the spell. He didn’t think he’d need it. Didn’t expect himself to ever be able to pull it off, anyway.

But he needed it, right now. He needed it more than anything.

So he reached inside himself and cupped his hands around the light in his chest. It wasn’t a lot of light. It probably wouldn’t be enough. But it had to be. It had to be, because he had to save Shadow, because he had to stop this.

He held onto the light inside him and pulled, and he pulled, until Holy burst from his skin.

He lost consciousness before he could tell if it’d made a difference.

 

 

An incredible light burst forth from Riku, and Shadow raised a hand to shield his eyes, flinching back. He expected the light to burn him, but it didn’t. In fact, as the light engulfed him, the fuzziness in his mind seemed to pull away. When the light faded and Shadow had finished blinking the spots out of his eyes, he realized the dark goo that had previously coated the street and surrounding buildings had vanished. So had the ghost of Maria’s corpse, leaving only—

Shadow winced and lowered his head, as the weight of what had just happened, what he’d just _done,_ settled on his shoulders.

He made himself look up, though, made himself look at the results of his mistakes. Two friends down, because _he’d_ attacked them.

“How could you let this happen, Shadow?” he asked himself, shame sitting heavy in his heart. He let out a long breath, then moved to retrieve his limiters. Picking them up again made his insides curdle. He couldn’t believe he’d let himself take them off. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t, not unless he had to—because it was dangerous, to harness that much chaos energy. And to have used it against people he could consider _friends_?

But in that moment, hearing the gunshot and watching Maria fall— _again,_ like he didn’t see it enough in his dreams at night—and then finding himself in a position where he could make those responsible _pay,_ instead of being jettisoned off into space… It had been too tempting.

“But that’s no excuse,” he whispered to himself.

Shadow snapped the limiters back around his wrist, relishing in the way the chaos was siphoned away from him. It was a little easier to breathe when there wasn’t a literal storm raging through his body. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, deciding his next action.

He could return to Riku and Penny, but there was nothing he could do for them. He didn’t know any kind of first-aid, so he couldn’t help Riku. And unless Penny was an Eggman brand robot, there was nothing he could do to help her either.

They’d probably be better off without him, anyway.

Shadow started skating down the street, opposite the way Maria had been leading him. (Because Riku was right, she can’t have been leading him anywhere good.) But then a voice that sounded suspiciously like Rouge whispered in the back of his mind:

_You’d just leave them there to die!?_

And Shadow stopped. Because that voice was right. Leaving them here was almost as bad as attacking them to begin with.

The city was empty, so there’d be no finding help here, but…

Maybe if he found a portal. Maybe he would even get lucky, and there’d be one nearby.

“Oh no, please, you don’t have to worry about that,” came a voice from above him.

Shadow spun to face its source, and found a woman in blue with pale blonde hair descending from above. She landed lightly in front of him, her dress swishing with the small amount of displaced air. Shadow did a doubletake at the sight of her, his mind whispering _Maria_ even though that was impossible, as well as a ridiculous assumption to make just because their hair was the same color. Though… there was something about the kindness of her smile, and the twinkle in her eyes…

“My name is Rosalina,” the woman continued. “And I know some people who can help your friends.”

Shadow looked her over, skeptical. Was she just another illusion? But then he caught movement above, and looked up to see some kind of spacecraft hovering above the city. Or was it… a small floating city, itself? Something similar to a castle, actually.

“Please, Shadow,” Rosalina pleaded. “I promise, it’s going to be okay. And I promise your friends won’t be angry with you. I think they understand.”

“How do you know?” Shadow demanded, because that was the most suspicious thing of all.

Rosalina looked uncomfortable for a few moments. “You’ll just… have to trust me.”

Shadow stared at her a moment more, then nodded. She seemed genuine enough, and… it was his only lead for helping his friends, for fixing his mistakes. So he really didn’t have a choice.


End file.
